Babur Founds the Mughal Empire
Babur defeated Ibrahim Lodi at Panipat on 21 April 1526 and founded the Mughal Empire, which lasted in some form until 1857. He had perhaps 12,000 men against a Delhi Sultanate army usually given as 100,000 with a thousand war elephants, though both figures are unreliable and the disparity was certainly large. He had also failed four times before. Babur had lost his ancestral Ferghana repeatedly, had taken and lost Samarkand twice, and had ruled from Kabul for twenty years while raiding into the Punjab. His invitation came from within: Daulat Khan Lodi, the governor of Lahore, and Ibrahim's own uncle Alam Khan asked him to intervene against a sultan who had alienated his nobility. The tactics won it. Babur lashed some seven hundred carts together across his front with gaps for gunfire, a technique borrowed from the Ottomans, and placed matchlock men and light field artillery under Ustad Ali Quli behind them. The Lodi charge broke on the barrier; the elephants panicked at the noise and turned back into their own ranks; and Babur's mounted archers executed the tulughma, wheeling round both flanks to compress the enemy into a mass too dense to fight in. Ibrahim Lodi was killed on the field, the only Delhi sultan to die in battle. Babur took Delhi and Agra within days and the Koh-i-Noor with them. The Rajput confederacy under Rana Sanga was beaten by the same method at Khanwa the following year. Babur ruled India for four years and disliked it thoroughly, as his memoir records at length. The empire he founded governed most of the subcontinent within a century.
- Year: 1526 CE
- Category: Conquest
